After 15 years, Maine chooses a seeming dark horse for new voter registration vendor
Courtesy / Office of the Maine Secretary of State
John Condon, president of Stonewall Solutions, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows on Friday signed the contract to develop Maine's new central voter registration system.
With the next general election barely six months away, and after 15 years with the same vendor, Maine is switching contractors for the state’s computerized voter rolls.
But the Massachusetts software developer hired last week to run and modernize them wasn’t Maine’s first choice.
Under an initial agreement for $1.84 million, Stonewall Solutions Inc. will develop and implement a new central voter registration system as well as software to manage the election process. The company replaces Civix, a government IT vendor whose subsidiary, PCC Technology, developed the current system — the state’s first — in 2007.
Civix, headquartered in New Orleans, has nearly 400 employees nationwide and in the 2020 general election managed registration for 45 million U.S. voters, according to the company website. That’s 29% of all those who cast a ballot.
Stonewall, in contrast, is a regional firm with some two dozen staff. In 2019 Stonewall developed its first central voter registration system for the state of Rhode Island, where the company has a data center and development office. The firm is now developing a CVR system for Massachusetts.
In a news release Tuesday, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said, “We’re excited to be moving forward on a new Central Voter Registration system for Maine with a partner who has a proven track record of providing the backbone of election administration: a secure, statewide voter list with features that will ease election administration for Maine’s hard-working local election clerks, and for voters themselves.”
The new system and the one it replaces don’t include Maine voting machines, which the state leases from Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software, one of the country’s largest such vendors.
Busy bidding
Nine companies including Civix bid last November on the new contract. The bids followed a request-for-proposals and request-for-information process that began in June 2021.
But Civix was disqualified in the state’s evaluation process because the company said it would not agree to turn over ownership of the new information system's raw material, the source code, to Maine. Another bidder was also disqualified for refusing, state procurement documents show.
The state announced the winning bidder in December — Kopis LLC, a developer in Greenville, S.C., whose proposal for the potential 10-year term of the contract included the lowest cost, $5.02 million.
But Kopis wasn’t the company signing the CVR contract with Bellows last Friday. The company with the next-highest score in the bid evaluation, Baltimore-based Canton Group, was not selected either.
A winning bid doesn’t represent a contract, and it’s not unusual for a vendor or government agency to walk away from a deal after a competitive proposal is selected.
For the CVR contract, the state’s evaluation considered bidders’ qualifications, proposed services and costs. A spokeswoman for Bellows, Emily Cook, could not immediately explain why Maine went with Stonewall instead of the higher-graded bidders.
Not starting from scratch
Stonewall’s bid came with a price tag of $7.52 million, covering implementation by July 2023 and optional maintenance and support through 2032, according to the state documents.
The newly inked agreement calls for Stonewall to “provide a secure platform for state and municipal-level election officials to maintain voter rolls, facilitate absentee and in-person voting, capture voter participation history, and implement public-facing online portals for absentee ballot requests and tracking, online voter registration, and voter information lookup.”
That’s a more advanced system than the one Maine began using in 2007. Like other states, Maine stepped up its election management technology in response to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the disputed presidential election of 2000.
Previously, the state relied on registration data and other information managed individually by over 500 Maine municipalities.
The current system, which Maine will continue to use through the November election, remains operational, according to the RFP, but “needs to be replaced with a modern software application and database with enhanced functionality.”
Cook told Mainebiz, “It’s important to know that the initial contract is different from [the Stonewall] contract since we’re moving from one system to another, rather than starting from scratch as we did with PCC back in the day.”
Stonewall President John Condon said, “We value relationships where our customers are passionate about implementing the best solution possible. The Maine Secretary of State team demonstrates this enthusiasm and commitment, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to partner with them.”
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I hope that William Hall and other reporters will follow up on this article and find out why Stonewall was selected over the higher graded bidders. To spend $2.5 million more than the State would have with the winning bidder, it had better be a very good reason.
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